It is advantageous for an online company or software developer to be able to understand how their users interact with user interfaces associated with their products and services. It is of considerable value to be able to identify why users of websites experience difficulties which may lead them to abandon products placed in shopping carts, abort sign up processes or abandon their user session completely, or why users of software applications encounter problems and become frustrated by a graphical interface.
Conversion analysts and online marketing analysts are continually attempting to identify problems in user journeys to both measure and correct issues that are preventing users from completing their session or carrying out certain tasks, such as adding products to a basket, checking out to purchase products in a basket, data entry and data lookups for example.
The ability to identify customer problems quickly and easily to expedite fixes to problems in a website sales funnel or a software application can significantly reduce frustration levels felt by users. Revenue can be increased, impact on brand and market position can be minimised and the burden on customer support processes reduced.
Funnel processes that involve purchase points provide website owners with a means of converting visitors into paying customers through a series of pages that can be measured, analysed and improved upon, thereby increasing revenue potential.
Web analytics is a well understood method for measuring online activity and identifying groups of users who are experiencing problems with an online process. However, whilst analytics may indicate to an analyst where a process is aborted prematurely, they do not identify what the cause is.
A user interface may often generate hundreds of thousands or millions of user sessions. Sifting through this data to find key pieces of insight poses a real problem for any conversion analyst.